Not worth trying to figure out. I dumped them in April and moved everything to Postimage. Should have done it sooner as PB had been getting buggier and slower but thought people would sign up for subscriptions.

Ego is the anesthesia that deadens the pain of stupidity

DISCLAIMER: These are the author's own personal views and do not represent the views of the author's employer.

Terms of service were changed with no warning this past week in what is a pure money-grabbing move.

F*ck off, Photobucket. I'm not paying you SHIT now after this stunt.

quote:

A few days ago, without any advance warning, Photobucket sneakily changed its terms of service to disallow third-party hosting, or hotlinking, on nearly all of its plan tiers. Most people use Photobucket explicitly for the ability to link from images on Photobucket to other locations such as blogs and forums, so this seems like a baffling move.

Until you realize the scam that's afoot: The only way to get your images to show up again is to pay Photobucket $400, upfront, as an annual subscription to its most expensive plan.

Ah, I see. It's a ransom demand.

I'm livid. I'd been using Photobucket to host my images on my Blogger blogs for ten years. For several of those years, I paid Photobucket an annual subscription for the benefits of unlimited bandwidth and extra storage...

For whatever reason, my photos have been spared. I have a free account, but I am using only 1% of my bucket.

What's weird is that if I follow the suggested URL www.photobucket.com/P500, I am taken to an titled album "P500" in "acax456's" bucket. This suggests to me some type of bug at least.

As for postimage, I have noticed that it occasionally did not work in the past. Instead of a member's avatar, I would see the text "Picture of <Member's Name>", and also embedded images were occasionally missing. This hasn't happened recently however.

Looks like I'm a victim of PB's new TOS POS hijack as well. I had just deleted several old photos off my account and uploaded some newer ones. I was only at %35 of account usage when this new TOS kicked in.

Until I found a notice about my apparent violation of this new TOS in my spam folder I knew nothing about it. Was there a public announcement from PB on this TOS change or did anyone receive any notifications prior to the TOS change?

Regardless, I've been using PB for many years now, solely as a 3rd party hosting site. I won't be extorted by them and will be deleting my photos from my account. I checked the website but couldn't find any way to do so... does anyone know if it is possible to delete a PB account?

I'm not sure what the difference is between "linking" and "3rd party hosting", but I don't think that Photobucket is going to be around much longer is they expect people to pay $400/year to embed images in forum posts. Whichever of the two that I am doing still works with the free plan.

I'm shocked at the "money grab" and "rip off" threads I've seen the last few days. This is an internet company spending lots and lots of money as a photo host... why did you think they were doing it? For fun? Of course not, it's a business. And since the majority of their users seem to use it to host photos off site, that's a lot more bandwidth.

Sure... you want to argue that their prices are too high, they probably are. But that's their option, easier to have 1 $40 customer than 4 $10 customers. I suppose they're hoping people will be willing to pay rather than move elsewhere.

But the fact is, you've been living there for free on all these years, and now you're complaining because they want to charge you rent.

_____________________________________________________Sliced bread, the greatest thing since the 1911.

There is only one way to avoid this and in this day and age every one should be doing this. First, get you very own domain name. Second, secure hosting and attach the domain name to it. GoDaddy does both but I only use them for domain names and I use site5.com for hosting.

Benefits:

you can do what you want

no one can shut you down as long as you pay

you can share your host with a friend

you can link thousands of images

it's less expensive than those photobucket prices

you get your own domain for your email address (no more cheap looking @gmail.com/@hotmail.com/@aol.com)

BTW, I don't think this is a new development. It's always been against their terms of service. They're just enforcing it now.

Ive used ImageEvent for geez 15+ years now. Even with having websites on two different providers (GoDaddy being on of them), I found it worth the money for how easy it is to use compared to getting stuff on them.

_____________________________________________________Sliced bread, the greatest thing since the 1911.

All my photos, posted on various threads in several forums, instantly broken.

No way am I giving them $400 just to host some freaking photos.

Now I have to go through the tedious task of downloading all my photos from Photobucket and migrating them to Imgur. And currently, I can't even access my Photobucket page. I imagine their servers are getting swamped by folks logging in to download their photos and delete their accounts.